Name: What We Owe
Rating: 3.8125 (8 reviews)
ISBN: 9781328995087

Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde

A compressed, visceral novel about exile, dislocation, and the emotional minefields between mothers and daughters.

What We Owe

Tehran, 1978: Nahid and Masood, both eighteen, are young lovers and young revolutionaries, determined to overthrow the Shah's regime and help to bring about democracy. Their clandestine activities are dangerous, but with youth, passion and right on their side, they feel invincible. Then one night, Nahid allows her younger sister to come along to a huge demonstration. Violence breaks out. Nahid lets go of her sister's hand. Everything changes.As the revolution sours, and the loss becomes too much to bear, Nahid and Masood are forced to flee to Sweden, on borrowed money with forged passports. Tehran is no longer safe for them, and now they are expecting a baby; they need to get out before they lose everything.Thirty years later, Nahid lies in a hospital bed replaying her life, raging at her carers, at her recent cancer diagnosis, at Masood, at her - now pregnant - daughter, and at her exile among people who while purporting to understand know nothing of what she has been through. Told with startling honesty, dark wit and an irresistible momentum, What We Oweis a novel of love, guilt and dreams for a better future, vibrating with both sorrow and an unquenchable joie de vivre.

Sandra

In this emotional novel, we get to know Nahid, an Iranian woman who suffers from cancer and who will soon die. After the revolution in Iran, Nahid and her husband Masud flee with their daughter Aram to Sweden, where they plan on starting a new life. However, the past has left its mark on them. This is a story about survival and loss. A beautiful and moving novel.


„Sand streams down to the earth because that's where it belongs. We can lift it, capture it, transport it. But even after oceans of time pass by, even after we've carried it across thousands of miles, sand will seek the earth again when the opportunity arises. So we are all bound to our origins.“

Sheila

2.5 stars. It's difficult to rate my feelings about this book (which is just slightly over novella size). It's a dark read of a middle-aged Iranian woman in Sweden who has been diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer, and she is bitter. 

It's understandable, and even relatable, that she would be bitter and angry about her diagnosis, but I couldn't stand how she refused to deal with her anger and instead lashed out at her daughter. Her behaviour read like something you would read in r/justnomil or r/raisedbynarcissists. It's not that her anger and bitterness - honed and polished to a sharp point over time - isn't justified, it's that instead of gaining the emotional maturity to confront those emotions and lay them to rest, she shoved the burden on her daughter with the mindset of "I gave birth to you in order to give me hope, it's your responsibility to make me feel better." Disgustingly selfish, and she never confronts or resolves this.

What this novel does do well is show the disconnection, heartbreak and listlessness of being in exile from your home. They're complex feelings to describe - especially to people who've never experienced that kind of violent upheaval - but that undercurrent of unfulfilled yearning is ever present here.

FWIW it's a quick read and the translation was well done, so pick it up if you're in the mood for something dark!

Moray Lyle McIntosh

Nahid is fifty and had just received a terminal diagnosis. She is also a refugee in Sweden having fled the Iranian Revolution in [date]. She takes us deep into her difficult feelings, with flashbacks of her traumatic past, from her links to the Iranian resistance, her flight and her relationships, the effect of her exile from the land of her birth. Her narrative of the refugee experience is searing, her feeling of being cut off from her roots, her difficulties building a feeling of home in a new country, her rightful pride in her own proven strength.
 
“People often see me as a victim. They expect me to be weak, submissive. As a refugee woman. I don’t understand their thinking. Don’t they realise I’m here because I’m strong? That it takes strength not to give up, to refuse to accept misery and oppression? Sometimes I wonder if they think they’re strong, that strength comes from never facing hardship. If they think a placid life builds resilience.”

Central to the story is her difficult relationship with her daughter Aram who is perfectly at home in Sweden and is expecting her first child with her Swedish partner. Nahid resents Aram’s comfort, the ways that her daughter can’t understand her or her experience making their interactions thorny and brittle but also full of love.

“I made that heart. Her heart once beat inside mine…soon it will beat without me. Soon my heart will fall silent, and hers will beat on, carrying my rhythm with it. Somewhere in her heartbeat I’ll remain.”

Bonde brilliantly articulates the complex emotions and character of a woman created by a life of pain and struggle who will now die, young, having never really had the chance to live. Nahid is angry, with her lot and with her life and with her daughter and her anger saturates this powerful, visceral novel. Bonde’s prose is piercing as she speaks about trauma and loss and their consequences, which affect more than just those who experience them directly. 

It’s not often that I feel that a book would be better for being longer, rather the opposite, but Bonde touches on so many things, offers us glimpses of so much of Nahid’s life that sometimes I was longing for just a little more detail. On balance, however, I would rather preserve the wonderful, spare beauty of her writing than upset it with superfluous minutiae.

What We Owe

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